Linkbaiting Our Way to a Better&nbspWorld?

This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Link baiting has been around for a fair while now, and we all know the basic concept is essentially driven by self interest, i.e., increasing website traffic for financial or personal gain.

But I have been thinking about the concept from another point of view. The web is an extremely competitive environment to operate a business in or even to disseminate information; hence the SEO industry and the Linkbait have needed to evolve with this competitive environment to remain effective. This has forced businesses to share more of their information and tools than ever before to remain competitive in this environment.

Remember way back in the 90’s when a well designed forum was a big deal, or a good review attracted attention? Now jump forward to today and forums and review sites number in their millions, and scripts or plugins for setting them up on a website for free are readily available.

All of SEOmoz’s free tools and content can be seen essentially as link bait to attract paying customers. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing; on the contrary, twenty five years ago the quality of resources shared freely on this site would have been unheard of outside a commercial context.

This type of sharing is happening on a huge scale, with high quality free information and tools available to anyone with an internet connection in just about any sector you could name.

Will this trend, which started as self interest, lead ultimately to a culture where open source and freedom of information are the dominant paradigms? I’m not sure but it’s a nice idea.

I'd like to think that with the full democratization of multimedia, now the people with a business mindset are finally being forced to create worthwhile and accessible stuff.

Now that we are all competing with the wit and artistry of the masses, who are doing their best to make the web a better place simply because they like it, we finally are financially shoved into being valuable and insightful and giving viewers what they want.

The engines aren't trying to find the best linkbait, they're trying to find the best content; linkbaiting is just an industry term for parroting that process for visibility.

I don't think the primary motive force is commercial or self-serving, I think most of the great things I see droppin hard on the net were created by people who were simply awesome at something and loved having a platform to share it, but in the end it doesn't matter.

Our virtual commons are indeed becoming better and better, and we will have to buy into that effort if we want to remain a relevant voice in them. Yay internet.

First, I believe open-source and freedom of information are very much a part of Western societies, and not just a trend anymore. It's becoming a force to reckon with that is changing business models (music industry for instance) and our ways of consuming goods and information.

Second, I had never thought of linkbaits as being open-source before, but it's an interesting point. As you stated though, it does start as a self interested action, and (to me) still is. Otherwise, what would be the point of creating linkbaits? Another major difference between open source technologies and linkbaits is the contribution coming from communities. Open source is created by many individuals while linkbaits were made by a few people, but are distributed by many individuals.

I think both linkbaits and open-source are products of an increasingly easier access to technologies, but are different, independant entities.

Thanks for the Feedback, I guess I was taking a bit of creative licence with the term open source, and also talking about where I see things might be headed in the future.

An example of what I was thinking about is W3schools, which allows free access to all of it's learning material, and reliesy on enough people seeing the valsue of it's certification program, or clicking through on one of it's ads to make money. Although not open source or creative commons or anything like that it gives people without the means for formal education a huge resource that would never have been availablea couple of decades ago.

Its funny you should bring this point to light because I was speaking with a coworker of mine about this just the other day. it seems that today it's just as valuable to make your info and tools freely availabe or at least a (teaser version) and reep the link benefits as it is to charge for it.

Hi, there's is nothing wrong with the concept of Linkbaiting. And most certainly not as seen from the perspective of... our own big friend Google!

Imho, every bit of content on the web that's worth linking to, whether it is an app, some interesting text, images, anything, can be considered (in a broad way) as a linkbait. If you think something is interesting to share, you link to it.

Google itself actually is the biggest linkbait on the web because of their outstanding search possibilities. And they used the old school 'Google search widget' as a webmaster tool to attract traffic.

Further, the concept of linkbaiting only applies in full effect when the bait is open to the public (logging-in not needed to access the bait).Anything freely available is perhaps to be considered as 'open source information', which gets me to my answer of your question Saadi:Yes, I think linkbaiting is all about freedom of information and about marketing exactly that.

I disagree, writing for your audience is just that writing for your audience, but what if your audiance are an unlikely demographic to link to your site, that's when link baiting comes into it's own, in that you are not writing for your audience, but writing for a variation of your audience who are likely to link.

Lets say I have a site about nurses, I could write about the best kind of steri strips...that might be interesting to nurses but it's not going to attract great in bound links. If I want to create link bait to this site, I might try and create something that would be passed around, or that would be linked to from unrelated sites, perhaps a "what would you look like as a nurse" tool, nurses already know what they would look like, but they may want to see what their partner would look like, then they would pass this round to all their friends, who in turn would play with the tool, some of these friends may have personal blogs, or their own website, some will bookmark it or digg it, that's the idea behind link bait as opposed to content.

There are some well established "Linkbaiting" tactics that are somewhat unique to blogging and journalism. Take a look at this link for a bad example. The title addresses an SEO hot-button issue, whether text or video is the best ranking content type, then proceeds to clumsily compare his own site (a video site) to techmeme (another video site) in an idiotic attempt to justify his point that video beats text. He also tells us that he's joining YouTube tomorrow because "SEO’s tell me that doing YouTube well helps your search engine ranking a lot."

This is a very typical example of linkbait. Catchy title with muddled and pointless body for the halfwitted Twitteratti to bounce around between each other so that they all can pretend to understand things and be a 'thought leader'.

Here's another example, which I think is quite good. It has the same elements, a hot-button issue with a catchy title. The difference is that it is not done in the style of "linkbait". Instead of pretending to be useful, it rips into the zombie horde that does the majority of the linking (and microblogging) and tries to expose how completely useless they really are.

Which is better? I saw the first example pop up in my online social sphere a dozen times, the second I saw once. I think that as long as we endure the digital echo chamber that lives in pointless symbiosis with the bloggers, we will have to slog through our fair share of half-ass linkbait in our feeds. Despite this, I still think there are more places to find great content than ever before, and I think more and more people are deciding to do it right.

Edit: Whoa, I didn't realize Robert Scoble was the Scobliezer (or whatever). All I can say is that he's far more intelligent in speaking engagements or maybe I just caught him on the wrong post.

I think it's just that as knowledge and information increase and improve, the older, less up to date stuff falls of the back of the truck, so to speak. The things that you can now get free you could get paid 6 months ago, in 6 months time the things that you are paying for today will be free, but that means that there is an increasing amount of free in the world, and a proportianately decreasing amountof paid. of course the paid then becomes increasingly valuable, as it gets progressively harder to disseminate the good from the bad, so we really shouldn't complain.